I am a longtime brand guy - mostly from the client side. I write mostly about smart or foolish things that brands do. I teach branding and social media at NYU and for ThirdWay Brand Trainers. Worked in marketing for Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, DoubleClick and others ...

Indies: How Your Next-Door Neighbor Is Changing Commerce

There are many parallels between Silicon Valley after the birth of the microprocessor (Intel’s 4404 in 1971) and the indie movements of the 2000s. The combination of powerful and inexpensive processors, readily available capital (independent venture capital emerged in Silicon Valley with Kleiner-Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital in 1972), a fluid labor market and the presence of Hewlett-Packard, Stanford University and the Palo Alto Research Center catalyzed the spectacular growth of Silicon Valley as a hub for global innovation. It was an era where people like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, Al Shugart, Larry Ellison and others could start a business in a garage, attract capital and grow to be world-class competitors.

The “traitorous eight” from Fairchild Semiconductor. Image from Wikipedia

But there are two primary differences between entrepreneurs and indies: a difference of kind and a difference of mind. The difference of kind? With very few exceptions, startups require capital and labor to scale. The model for an entrepreneurial success story is a company started by an individual that went on to become a very large and valuable enterprise.

The difference of mind has to do with the goals of entrepreneur versus the indie. The entrepreneur seeks control as a means to implementing a vision, where the vision is building an enterprise that can be sold or go public. In other words, the entrepreneur imagines a lifecycle that ends with control passing to others. The indie seeks the opposite, and often trades security and remuneration for independence and creative control.

I’m not suggesting that there aren’t entrepreneurs who want to run a single small business they create for their whole life or indies who dream of signing a big recording contract or publishing deal. But across multiple industries there are successful designers, artists and artisans leaving corporations to go indie to gain control and freedom rather than to get rich.

The golden era of Silicon Valley did make important contributions to the current generation of indies, however. The technologies that arose from the microprocessor boom are driving the post-millennial indie explosion. Thanks to cheap, high-powered personal computers, expert software and the Internet (whose predecessor, the Arpanet had one of its first four nodes in Menlo Park) and the development of the social web, indies in the 2000s could do things that would have been impossible in earlier decades. They had access to inexpensive tools that allowed them to produce professional quality products on their own (like comedian Louis CK who edits his television show Louie on a laptop).

And thanks to Silicon Valley, post-millennial indies don’t need a geographic hub to bloom. They can now find and support each other online. Indie movements have always influenced the culture of mainstream industries, but this new generation is threatening industry giants. It’s time to take them seriously.

But what about those “makers” that got so much media attention in the past couple of years? Aren’t they supposed to be the ones to revolutionize industry and overturn established companies? Aren’t they the real inheritors of the mantle of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs of the eighties?

The Industrial Revolution dramatically increased output, raised the quality and lowered the prices of manufactured products. It also had a profound influence on society, largely ending serfdom, fueling the rise of cities, the decline of small-scale agriculture and the growth of the modern corporation. It changed the role and structure of families, increased social mobility and set the stages for cholera pandemics that gave rise to the first coordinated public health laws.

The MakerBot replicator 3D printer (courtesy Makerbot)

It’s also important to remember that the Industrial Revolution took place in slow motion by modern standards. The innovations in textiles alone that caused the most dramatic changes (the flying shuttle, spinning jenny, spinning mule and power loom) spanned more than fifty years. In fact, the term “Industrial Revolution” didn’t become widespread until nearly a century after the revolution had commenced.

The maker movement is accelerating rapidly as technology advances. 3-D printing in particular is showing promise in numerous unexpected areas, allowing makers to produce surprising items like personalized medical devices and even food. So I’m not arguing that makers aren’t important.

But what defines makers? They work independently (often individually), produce and market their own products. They come from a mix of backgrounds, both with and without industry experience. They’ve caught the eye of big brands, who are doing their best to benefit from the perception that they are on the cutting edge. In other words, they sound a lot like indies.

Rather than isolating makers as a special case or ignoring them altogether, makers need to be judged as indies. Makers have made important strides in achieving consumer preference that indies in publishing or comedy might learn from. On the other hand, other indie movements have innovated in ways that could benefit makers.

Why We Should Compare Indie Movements

Oddly, the indie movements in film, music, gaming, publishing, fashion, crafts and other spheres are largely unconnected. There isn’t much communal awareness between indies in different fields. This would be fine if they were all following exactly parallel paths and learning identical lessons.

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